SEP 18, 2019
For 34 years, Colorado asked 'Where is Jonelle Matthews?' Now, it's 'Who killed her?'
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In the winter of 1984, Jonelle’s disappearance shook Greeley — a conservative, close-knit city set 60 miles north of Denver on Colorado's High Plains.
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In March 1985 — a few months after Jonelle vanished from her family’s west Greeley home on Dec. 20 — President Ronald Reagan mentioned her in a speech to a group of Washington, D.C., newspaper editors as fear over high-profile child abductions gripped the nation.
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Decades would pass without any notable progress in the search for Jonelle. As time beat on, her case grew colder, becoming the oldest unsolved missing person case in Weld County, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
“We were consigned to the fact that we were never going to find out what happened to her,” Jonelle’s father, Jim Matthews, told the Coloradoan in a recent interview.
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But 34½ years later, just north of Weld County Road 34½, oil site crews digging for a pipeline on July 24 uncovered a set of human bones, including a skull with intact, braces-lined teeth — just like Jonelle’s.
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In 1984, the home Gilliland has lived in since 2001 was one of only three in the immediate area, he said. Surrounded by flat farmland for decades, it would have been "essentially a no-man's land" when Jonelle went missing, he added.
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Within a nine-months span of 2013, Gilliland's wife discovered two discarded dogs — an icy Akita-Labrador mix and bright white great Pyrenees mix — while driving near the site where Jonelle would ultimately be found. The family adopted both.
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With the July discovery breathing new life into a decades-old mystery, the Matthews family — and Greeley — are now holding out hope for justice.
For 34½ years, they asked, "Where is Jonelle?"
Now they have a different question: "Who killed her?"
'A thousand million times'
Gloria laughed when I asked what Jonelle was like.
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Gloria recalls detailed requests from Jonelle before each of her birthdays. "I want a strawberry cake," she remembers Jonelle saying. "I want it pink."
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Deanna, now 47 and living in New Jersey, met Jonelle when she moved to Greeley with her dad, Russell, and brother, Brent, in 1980. The girls went to the same elementary school and soon realized their families belonged to the same church — Greeley's Sunny View Church of The Nazarene.
"She was very friendly and just very loud," Deanna recalled. "I always say that I was very shy and she was very outgoing so I think we complimented each other well. She was really theatrical and dramatic and just the center of the room."
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Because Jim was at Jennifer's high school basketball game that night and Gloria was on a plane to Los Angeles to surprise her ailing father for Christmas, Jonelle got a ride home with Deanna and her father, Russell Ross.
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One month later, an advanced reporting class at Colorado State University was watching it wide-eyed.
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They spent weeks traveling to and from Greeley, talking to investigators and characters in Jonelle's story. Like the police, they were giving Jonelle's disappearance a fresh look.
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Within a day, the news was out, and Kim Spencer, the instructor of CSU's advanced reporting class, was texting a link to her students.
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"Holy s---."
The kids
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They were hopeful — so much so that Gloria set a place for Jonelle at the table during the family's Christmas Eve dinner in case she walked through the door.
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Her disappearance came just six months after the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC — a first-of-its-kind national resource center dedicated to finding missing kids — was established by Congress.
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